Part of the job of reading Aristotle is reading and re-reading till one reaches only a satisfactory understanding of what is ultimately being said. We already know that that the Metaphysics have to do with the question of being, and that with the question of being begs the question of a primary being, which can be said to be the ultimate cause. This means that while we are reading only two short chapters, we are also jumping three-quarters of the way into the complexity of Aristotle’s inquiry about being and a primary mover that looks like God. With all this in mind, it is also difficult to ignore a few of the points Aristotle makes in chapters 6 and 7. For instance, there’s the idea that “actuality is prior to potentiality” (1072a, 10). This in itself is interesting since we typically assume that potentiality must precede the actual, so Aristotle’s claim becomes one where potential is contained within the actual. This is a profound thought indeed, one that anticipates Bergson’s ideas of the virtual, and so on. Another point, similar in its profundity, is brought about in chapter 7, where Aristotle names a “mover, which moves without being moved, being eternal, substance, and actuality” (1072a, 25). Along with this mover, Aristotle also attributes thought, the good, the eternal, and a intricate way that it is necessary without being caused itself (1072b, 1-30). From here we move through chapters 9 and 10, where we find Aristotle trying to qualify what the nature of divine thought consists of. His opening up of the discussion starts with the tail end of chapter 8. Aristotle finds inspiration with the idea that the divine is not anthropomorphic and is better thought of as “the first substances to be gods” (1074b, 10). Aristotle continues with the idea that divine thought must be of a substance, it must also be “itself that thought thinks” (1074b, 34). This must mean that the kind of thought that the divine is, must contain thinking before thought thinks about things—the divine is thought (shades of Xenophanes’ divine). Aristotle also seems to discount the idea that this divine thought can be composite, since human thought is not necessarily composed of parts of thought. Divine thought must then be whole, and not a composite of thought units. In Chapter 10 Aristotle compares the good and the higher good (of the divine) to an army and the leader, respectively. This is a way of saying that the good depends on the higher good, and not the other way around. To suggest that order depends on the higher good suggests a telos to Aristotle’s divine, i.e.: order is informed by to good, to be what it is and what it will be. Another point Aristotle addresses has to do with the Pre-Socratic (probably Heraclitus) notion of contraries. Aristotle finds this view lacking in its lack of full explanatory evidence. There are other views Aristotle covers including Plato’s Forms, with a question of how real things (forms) actually participate with the Forms. Aristotle concludes later in the chapter that “the form and the thing are one” (1076a, 35). Characteristic of this move we find the Homeric quote at the end “the rule of the many is not good, let there be one ruler” (1076b, 5).

[1] Aristotle, Metaphysics from The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, n.d., 1692-1700.

Social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which mislead theory into mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of practice.

—Karl Marx “Theses on Feuerbach” (Thesis VIII)

For a better understanding of what Karl Marx meant by the term alienation we will examine three of his early texts from the 1840s, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction” (1843-44); the “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844” (hereafter the “1844 Manuscripts”); and the posthumously published “Theses on Feuerbach” (1845, published by Frederic Engels in 1888).[1] We will briefly examine how Feuerbach’s critique brings Marx to his analysis of alienation. Then, using Marx’s descriptions, from his “1844 Manuscripts”, alienation will be further investigated in order to identify key moments of estrangement in the working life of laborers. Final consideration will be given to Marx’s VIIth thesis on Feuerbach, and its relation to alienation within the dynamic role of praxis.

In Marx’s “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction” there are opening references to Feuerbach’s critique of religion, whereby Feuerbach arrived at the realization that “man makes religion; religion does not make man.”[2] This idea propelled Marx toward his own critique of religion (Christianity) which places man in an alienated relationship with a spiritual ideal that can never be fully actualized.

Before Marx, alienation as a philosophical concept was dealt with in Hegel’s description of the way self-consciousness becomes self-alienated in order to become socialized, and ultimately, how self-consciousness knows itself (re: the absolute knowing of self-consciousness and Geist).[3] Marx’s critical contribution, thanks to Feuerbach’s critique of religion and Hegel, was to emphasize that man’s labor is the origin of culture and society, instead of the other way around, whereby man is subordinate to the state and religion as it was according to Hegel. In order to critique capitalism, we need to comprehend such mystifications. Man is not a predicate of society, society is made by man. Marx’s aim was to critique Hegelian, Feuerbachian, religious, societal, and economic mystifications. This meant critiquing how things are in actuality, according to Marx and Engel’s incessant erudition, instead of appealing to traditional philosophical abstractions.

In Marx’s “1844 Manuscripts,” the first section “Estranged Labor” reveals an in-depth description of the phenomenon of alienation as it relates to the political economy of his day—otherwise known as economics. Marx writes that capitalism carries with it the integral components of private property, and the profits of capital. Both of these elements require a division of labor whereby the workers become a mere commodity of the capitalist’s mode of production. The property owners (capitalists), by way of competing for profits, consolidate, and form monopolies. Society is taken to the level of property owners competing with each other for bigger profits, and workers who have little to no property, who form the base of capital. Marx identifies the way in which this model of capitalism is usually explained in veiled terms that favor the capitalist’s viewpoint at the expense, and ignorance, of the laborer’s perspective. Hence, “the worker becomes an even cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates.”[4]

A worker, entrenched in a capitalist circumstance, is encouraged to be productive, while his life becomes evermore devalued. Capitalist production not only produces commodities in the form of objects, but the laborer’s work also becomes a commodity, therefore, the worker is a dispensable commodity. Marx shows that the product’s value stems from the labor produced by human beings. The products, in-and-of-themselves, become alien, distant, and necessarily objectified from the hands that produced them. Yet, objectification itself should not be mistaken for alienation, since objectification is a necessary part of making things for human beings. The phenomena of alienation comes about because the products and the worker’s labor’s are no longer his own. Production and its products are not controlled by the worker after the products leaves his hands. Alienation becomes more trenchant as the worker’s human-nature is detached from the private property born from his labor.

There are four modes of alienation identified by Marx, and each mode is not mutually exclusive of the others. Alienation is an “avaricious”[5] byproduct of capitalism’s competition and it represents a detachment, or alienation/estrangement, from (a) the product: whereby the product is objectified from the worker, but the product is not his own, since the product is produced as a basic means to earn wages; (b) the process: whereby the labor required to produce the commodity is not his own, the process is also an objectification from the man’s will, his base labor is a means to earn wages and to create private property; (c) his species being or human-nature: Marx, after Hegel, recognized that man’s way of being, and interacting in society, is primarily defined by products of his labor, however this essential interaction of man’s environment/ nature is cut off by the capitalist, since the capitalist’s abstract interaction with nature is more important, the capitalist uses (and exploits) the laborer’s human-nature as his base means of production; (d) other people: as a direct result of becoming alienated the relationship of the capitalist and the laborer becomes an abstract market relation. “Not the gods, not nature, but only man himself can be this alien power over man.”[6]

Lastly, when we turn to Marx’s VIIth Thesis on Feuerbach[7], quoted above, we are immediately reminded of the theme of praxis (re: practice). Praxis has roots in Hegel as well as ancient philosophy. Marx felt that in order to understand the effects of alienation we have to understand the practices of capitalism. “The medium through which estrangement takes place is itself practical.”[8] This suggests that to address the symptoms we have to know, and therefore, critique the causes of the alienation as it is made manifest in the working world. With the advent of new practices, new problems, and their accompanying concepts emerge.[9] If we don’t actively expose the causes of the multiple problems surrounding the capitalist practices that enable and foster alienation, we cannot overcome the resulting suffering and careless oversight of existing conditions. For Marx understanding alienation makes way for revolution.

Aurelio Madrid

[1] All three texts are from: Robert C. Tucker, ed, The Marx-Engels Reader, New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 1972, 1978.

[2] Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” The Marx-Engels Reader, 53.

[3] See G.W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, (1807).

[4] Marx, “1844 Manuscripts,” 71.

[5] “The only wheels which political economy sets in motion are avarice and the war amongst the avaricious—competition.” Marx, “1844 Manuscripts,” 71.

[6] Marx, “1844 Manuscripts,” 78.

[7] Recall that Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach” was written in 1844-5, i.e. within close proximity to the “1844 Manuscripts.”

If the primacy of presence can be questioned, then the tradition of univocal metaphysics can be reevaluated by way of Jacques Derrida’s ‘deconstructive’ philosophy. The artwork Untitled (Corpus Vile) made in2012, by the contemporary American artist Jason Loebs, offers a modest five-piece suite featuring margins. The marginal falls outside of the center of focus. The slim concept of marginalia presents a way of doing philosophy from the periphery. The marginal offers a generous place to explore Derrida’s deconstructive handling of traditional ways of seeing, thinking, or writing philosophically. Given that presence itself is questioned in Derrida’s deconstructive context, it will then be evaluated by means of Loebs’s piece as presented in a gallery, online, in print, etc. Deconstruction need not be characterized as a bygone trend/fad/fashion—instead it has to be handled carefully and without haste. In order to get at Derrida’s encounter with philosophy one must begin from the primary vantage of what deconstruction actually means by way of his technical terms: aporia and difference. These and a number of surrounding issues will be examined for this research paper.

For the sake of organizational clarity this essay will be divided into two sections: in the first section “Reconstructing Deconstruction: an Impossibility” Derrida’s philosophy will be looked at, trying, at best, to define what Derrida meant by the now over-abused term deconstruction. To open the ideas up, the author of The Derrida Dictionary, Simon Morgan Wortham writes that for Derrida “deconstruction entails ‘the experience of the impossible.’”[2] The humility of such an enterprise (i.e. impossibly defining deconstruction) will then have to be embraced in the noble spirit of brevity and necessary concision, while keeping in mind that deconstruction self-consciously defers definition. The second half of the paper, titled “Loebs’s Marginalia: a Deconstructive Reading” will feature another creative venture: to positively[3] and deconstructively read Jason Loebs’s 2012 five piece artwork Untitled (Corpus Vile).

I. “Reconstructing Deconstruction: an Impossibility”

Today there is a widespread belief that the philosophy of deconstruction entails taking things apart. In its most rudimentary sense the literal word deconstruction does actually mean to disassemble. But, therein lays a question as to whether or not deconstruction, that branch of late 20th century philosophy (with postmodernism and post-structuralism as its notable peers and influences) coined by Jacques Derrida, is entirely concerned with disassembly, destruction, and breaking things down?[4] To be absolutely fair, its meaning must include this popular view to some extent, yet it must retain and go beyond it to be realized in a positive arena of writing philosophically. From its inception sometime in the late 1960s, deconstruction was primarily concerned with text, literature, philosophy, and writing in general. Deconstructive ideas can be (and have been) generously extended to other areas, such as architecture, art, ethics, and so on. Admittedly, there will be obvious problems discussing Derrida’s in/famous philosophy of deconstruction. Given these (soon to be outlined) problems, what is generally indicated by the term: deconstruction? Dermot Moran, in his Introduction to Phenomenology tells us that deconstruction is not a method, nor is it a “procedure or system of thinking.”[5] And Wortham, admits to such problems when it comes to ‘grounding’ a theory of deconstruction “that which founds or institutes always imposes itself, for Derrida, more or less violently, more or less unjustifiably, taking possession of its ground at the price of significant exclusions or contradictions.”[6] This means that while attempting to ‘define’ and/or ‘ground’ a deconstructive theory, it is almost counterproductive to the deconstructive process, since Derrida’s deconstruction aims to uncover what was excluded, or contradicted, in the original grounding, in the original foundation of a given text, artwork, etc.. All this begs the question again: then how is deconstruction defined, without appealing to a ground or foundation? This could be possible, yet an anxious appeal will have to be made with respect to more traditional methods of getting to know something, at least to initially describe it. In short, the philosophy of deconstruction will not be deconstructed here.

There is an ambiguous term that reaches back to the ancient Greek philosophy known as aporia.[7] An aporia is thought of as a riddle to be solved, or an aporia represents something that remains unresolved, or even, an aporia is a path. Derrida once asked “What would be a path without aporia?”[8] Derrida made deliberate use of this ancient word in his deconstructive philosophy. As a matter of fact, aporia could be seen as way to introduce deconstruction. But there too is a conundrum with coming to any kind of solid conclusion about the meaning of the word aporia, as if there could be a conclusion about deconstruction itself, since an aporia can be thought of as an impasse, that which is unresolved, something un-decidable, etc.[9] If a riddle is there to be looked at, it must be admitted that it must remain a riddle in order for it to be contemplated. This is to say that Derrida doesn’t seem to be working on ‘solving’ riddles. Deconstruction is not a method toward clear-cut solutions. It is better to think of deconstruction as opening up and showing the riddles to begin with, i.e. the activity of deconstruction is an avid disclosing of the riddles that are already there in the context of whatever writing, artwork text is under consideration. Deconstruction is already at work in any given text, philosophy, or artwork. Moran reminds us that Derrida consistently said that deconstruction “is an anonymous process which is already at work in the world, prior to our conceptualizations, as the very transcendental source of our conceptuality.”[10] This must mean that the problems, riddles, oppositions that are looked at in deconstruction, are already there in the very way we logically[11] think about things—the problems are there to be uncovered and examined. In the first paragraph for the entry “Deconstruction” from the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy states that “what is typically occurs in a deconstructive reading is that the text in question is shown to harbor contradictory logics which are standardly ignored—or concealed from view—on other more orthodox accounts.”[12] This idea of something that is ‘concealed from view’ is an aporia, which is considered to be the beginning of a deconstructive reading.

A difficulty that immediately arises when trying to comprehend deconstruction is the aforementioned issue of oppositions. The ways binary oppositions are looked upon deconstructively is that they are themselves an aporia. Opposition creates a kind of challenge, or riddle to be disclosed for what it is. So this partially reveals what is meant when a text is deconstructed. As mentioned earlier, it is a misnomer to think of deconstruction as merely taking something apart, but, it was admitted that deconstruction still must contain this rudimentary way of thinking about it. Moran writes about this “Deconstruction involves taking apart the text to show that its supposed argument or thesis actually turns against itself…”[13] Moran also ties this peculiarity in with G.W. F. Hegel “this is an essentially Hegelian insight which Derrida interprets in a new way.”[14] Without getting too in-depth, Moran is suggesting that, as it is well known, Derrida read plenty of Hegel, and that at the core of Hegel’s philosophy is the dialectic, whereby the resolution to a contradiction must contain the contradiction within it. Derrida sought to question traditional metaphysics and deconstructive philosophy was how that was done.

Andrew Curtrofello in his Derrida entry in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy writes that “for Derrida, the history of Western metaphysics consists in a series of repeated efforts to affirm self-presence as the paradigm of truth.”[15] Another way of saying this would be to say that Derrida’s positions seek to show that traditional metaphysics privileges experience over a description of it, speech is privileged over writing, thought is privileged over language, and so forth. This should explain why Derrida was so endlessly fascinated by texts and writing. But, to be very careful, since this is suggesting that Derrida’s aim was to then reverse the traditional roles of metaphysical opposition. Cutrofello anticipates this problem by following up with:

Derrida’s aim is not to ‘reverse’ these hierarchical oppositions—as it would be if he were interested in privileging writing over speech—but to deconstruct the very logic of such exclusionary founding gestures.[16]

This particular (and dare we say dialectical) way in which Derrida contends with the issue of binary opposition points to several key gestures in the philosophy of deconstruction—finding the aporia, exposing and disclosing opposition, working with thought and language without prioritizing either.

Given the above examples, another similar thread of deconstruction has to do with Derrida’s special term “différance.” To understand this term, one has to have a better grasp of what Derrida’s position was on the metaphysics of presence, aporia, and binary oppositions (all of which were considered above). In a slim collection of interviews from the 1970s titled Positions Derrida is interviewed by the Belgian playwright Henri Ronse, where Ronse asks Derrida about the word différance.[17] In a classic deconstructive move, the meaning of the word expands and expands as Derrida explains it, throughout a couple of pages, he says that:

First, différance refers to the (active and passive) movement that consists in deferring by means of delay, delegation, reprieve, referral, detour, postponement, reserving. […] Second, the movement of différance, as that which produces different things, that which differentiates, is the common root of all oppositional concepts that mark our language […].

This différance points back to what has been at issue all along: deconstruction. Because if différance combines the words deferral and differentiation, then what is left of meaning? Perhaps something that looks like this: “↔” deconstruction is an expression of always deferring and differentiating. One motive of deconstruction is detecting the aporia of opposition, then looking at what is not being said, along with what has been overlooked, by way of emphasizing what has been prioritized and expressed, then seeing what can be positively found ‘already at work’ deep inside the opposition, the conflict, the negation, the problem, the text, the artwork and, surely, the philosophy. Like phenomenology (Derrida ‘cut his teeth’ on Edmund Husserl’s early book Origin of Geometry[18]) deconstruction is a descriptive understanding, an opening up, and a disclosure.[19]

II. “Loebs’s Marginalia: a Deconstructive Reading”

“This fissure is not one among others. It is the fissure: the necessity of interval, the harsh law of spacing.”

––Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology[20]

§1. Grounding? …now to a question of grounding Jason Loebs’s 2012 artwork Untitled (Corpus Vile). Here is the usual tactic: what is his biography?—Where did he grow up? Where was he educated? Where does he live today? We already know that he’s American, but to what end will the question of where he was born serve? That he grew up in a culture that venerates mass media is already clear. That he is alive in the 21st century tell us that he is probably saturated in the ways of social media, and, of course print media, etc. These things are assumptions since there is no real way to ask him right now via e-mail, or otherwise. So, the things that we can tell about him, without direct knowledge of his biography will remain mostly presumptive. The fact that he’s American doesn’t suggest very much, other than the obvious. However, a quick glance at his CV from his Gallery Essex Street, in New York, NY does tell us some specific things about him.[21] Loebs was born in 1980, in Hillside, New Jersey. In 2011 he went to the Whitney Museum of American Art, on an Independent Study Program, in New York, NY. In 2007 he received his MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago, in Chicago, IL. In 2004 he received a ‘certificate’ from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA. And in 2003 he attended Yale Norfolk, in Norfolk, CT. Okay, there’s more of what might be called a traditional grounding. This does inform a little more than if we only knew that he’s an American.

And now that we know he’s from the East Coast, perhaps he was born into a family of privilege, if he didn’t come from money, then he still had to work really hard to get where he’s at. If he was born to money, he had to work hard, if was born poor, he had to work hard. Both scenarios imply work. It can’t be assumed it was easy for him to get where he’s at, living in New York, NY, one of the most expensive places to live on the planet. As it can be tediously seen, we are getting to know Loebs better, but are we getting to know his art any better? We could draw multiple conclusions from his past, say, if we knew about his hometown in New Jersey, or if we knew he various professors in Chicago, New York, and Norfolk—but we don’t. So his biography has revealed that he’s an American, he’s probably from a well-off family, he has a solid (okay, elite) education, and that he is actively showing his work in a hip New York gallery. We would have to know more about him to give this ‘grounding’ any more weight then a cursory glance at his CV provided by him and his gallery. To be sure, anytime he wishes to show anywhere else, these spare details will be the first things people look at, other than his art, of course. Odd that so much of his life’s effort is reduced to just a few lines on a CV, a few lines of text. But, one shouldn’t be dismayed at such a reductive look at his life. After all, he’s getting our full attention right now. The slim facts of his biography have already informed us about things that go far beyond dates and places. He’s somewhat successful, he’s made a name for himself, and that he’s a represented artist.

Here it can be seen that a typical maneuver of art historical research, that is, to look into the biographical details of an artist to inform us of his/her work, (and with all due respect to Loebs) was oddly not very productive in telling us about his artwork. The biographical grounding becomes something that’s not really informative beyond his professional CV. Still it was very productive in showing how, in some cases, little of a person’s biography can actually tell us about his/her art.

§2. Aporia. Loebs’s artwork Untitled (Corpus Vile) is something to be disclosed. But what is to be disclosed is a group of five room-height (8’ 9” tall) margins that look to be from the edges of a newspaper. When looked at closely, they are not just the edges of the newspapers cut off, then photographed. They look like they have been photo-shopped and reworked. The edges of the text have been cut off. If these were ordinary margins from newspapers, the words would not be cut off on the margin side on the edges of the page. There is the mystery of why he didn’t use the only the bare edges of newspapers. Why did they have to be photo-shopped? It is questions like this that point to another question: why are we always trying to get at the source of the artist’s reasons why he/she did something in the first place. It is as if what is there in front of us is not answer enough. Then this leads to another important issue about how we are viewing the work. It is not in the gallery pictured here on this pixilated computer screen (or on the printed page). It is often thought that seeing an artwork up close and personal, i.e. live, is better that in reproduction. But a reproduction is all we have right now, this is it, this artwork will probably never be seen by us in person. Is this somehow a lesser experience? And how much artwork do we look at only in reproduction? The deconstructive problem of presence becomes an important one in this case. Loebs himself might think of how his work looks online, and the gallery too must have thought of it too, since they’re offering it to be seen on their website. How often are we aware of such seemingly unimportant ways that we view art? The presence of the Untitled (Corpus Vile) is virtual, but is this virtual way of seeing it less than a real way of engaging the work in person?

§3. Already at Work. The curious ‘non-title’ of Loebs’s artwork: Untitled (Corpus Vile) is one way that deconstruction is already at work in the work. First, it is not titled, yet behind the fact that it is not titled it has a parenthetical title: (Corpus Vile). Corpus, meaning body, or body of work, a collection of work, in this case Corpus must mean a collection of works, a suite of margins that are themselves a small body of work. There might also be a suggestion of a body. The artwork consists of five pieces, suggesting a head, two arms, and two legs. And then there’s Vile, meaning disgusting, evil, etc. Putting the parenthetical part of the artwork’s title together, we have a disgusting body that hides behind no title. Yet, there is not all that much that is visually disgusting about the piece. This title must serve as an allusion to the disgust we have with the marginal. That which has no primary focus is something to be ignored or reviled. Indeed we dislike those things which are marginal, because we want what is important, what is relevant. Newspapers themselves are now marginal media, and when there is the emphasis on the marginal of the already marginal, surely there is deconstruction at work, waiting to be disclosed and opened up. The marginal is the subject matter, and that which is disgusting is not as acceptable as getting to what’s important—the ads, the stories, and the journalism.

Deconstruction points to the things we will never be fully satisfied with, the marginal, the edges of thought, and the absence of presence. Loebs’s piece does the same. The intellectual activity of doing philosophy is also a question of going beyond the everyday way of thinking about things. Such ways of thinking are often derided as not important. Derrida was all about bringing new questions to bear. What is important? What is not important?—and how these two questions work together (inconclusively and impossibly). Whatever lies outside of a system is informed by what lies inside of a system that excludes it, and so on…

[2] Simon Morgan Wortham, The Derrida Dictionary, (New York, NY: Continuum Books, 2010) , 1. That Wortham places ‘experience of the impossible’ in singular quotes, it is likely that this is a quote (or paraphrase) from one of Derrida’s seventy+ books, but it is not indicted which one.

[3] By stating that this will be a positive reading means that Loebs’s artwork will be looked at (read) with an understanding that deconstruction is not an outright destructive process, and that the philosophy is better situated and grasped as a positive descriptive engagement, i.e. it is less a question of what the artwork is not, and instead what can be said about the artwork—deconstructively.

[4] The Belgian/American literary critic Paul de Man (1919-1983) is considered to be another leading proponent of deconstruction.

[17] Jacques Derrida, “Implications: Interview with Henri Ronse,” in Positions, translated by Alan Bass. (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1981), 1-14. Note, this book also contains a fascinating interview with Julia Kristeva.

[18] See Wortham’s entry “Edmund Husserl” in The Derrida Dictionary, 73. In 1962 Derrida wrote the introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry (1936?) and he wrote a dissertation on The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy.

[19] Also recall Derrida’s indebtedness to Husserl’s in/famous student Martin Heidegger. Heidegger often spoke of truth as aletheia, a disclosure, etc. Also note: Derrida’s term deconstruction is derived from Heidegger’s destrucktion, which featured in Heidegger’s 1927 lecture course The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Moran, “Derrida,” Introduction to Phenomenology, 451.

That the ancient 3rd century Neo-platonic philosopher Plotinus should choose to first write about beauty is in itself a beautiful thing.[1] Why couldn’t one falling for a beautiful object, idea, or virtuous living, also be a person who falls in love with wisdom? It is in his introductory treatise, “Beauty” from the Enneads, that Plotinus makes the uncommon (yet entirely relevant) connection between aesthetics and ethics. This affiliation is relevant if we accept that the ethical life or better yet, the virtuous life is one that is beautiful to our universal conceptions of how one aspires to virtue. The spare objectives for this paper will be to first look at Plotinus’s opening sections of his treatise on the beautiful that analyze various qualities concerning a physical conception of beauty, and then continuing through the treatise to examine his way of transitioning from physical matters to an all-important aesthetic of virtue. In closing, a few ideas will be offered by which to contemplate Plotinus’s departure from the material.

Without any unnecessary forgoing, in §§1-3, Plotinus presents us with a few basic notions that have to do with a sensory perception of the beautiful, as visual, auditory, etc. These are immediately sketched in tandem with the idea that a virtuous life is also something of beauty. “Dedicated living, achievement, character, intellectual pursuits” are themselves beautiful (I, 6 [1], 1). But what of these things in relation to one another?—how is the virtuous related to a beautiful object? Firstly, Plotinus has to get us to understand what he means by a beautiful thing, a “bodily form,” this has to be done before one can know how appreciating virtue is aesthetical. A reason why this arrangement is valuable is that one might forget that to consider something beautiful might mean to go beyond the sensual. In our media saturated culture, it’s easy to forget that the beautiful can be something other than (commercialized) sight, scent, sound, touch, or taste. It is just as well that in Plotinus’s time there were those who thought that beautiful things had only to do with symmetry.[2] In our own regard, this simple idea should not be cast off too quickly, since it does stand to reason that a beautiful face is one that is supposedly more symmetrical. Or in another vein, that a handsome building such as Michelangelo’s St Peter’s Basilica in Rome is beautiful due to its symmetry. Certainly too, a butterfly’s wings are beautiful in their symmetry. It’s easy to see why the ancient thinkers would have thought of beautiful things as possessing symmetry, yet it becomes clear for Plotinus that this is not the only trademark of beauty. Held within this notion, that beauty is tied to things that are symmetrical, is also the idea that these things must be composites—that they be made up of parts. To be sure, of the examples mentioned, these things are composite, a butterfly has a body in the middle of two wings, and St. Peter’s Basilica has a central dome flanked by two smaller domes on either side, and so on. Can one not find beauty in a non-composite thing? “But is not gold beautiful? And a single star by night?” (I, 6 [1], 1). In agreement with Plotinus, it will be said that gold’s power is beautiful all by its self, and that it doesn’t always need any of the aforesaid symmetry for us to cherish it all the same.

Along with these issues, there is another more pressing question. Since Plotinus privileges the virtuous with his consideration of the beautiful, this begs the question as to whether or not the soul’s ways can be said to be symmetrical. How can one suggest that, for example, an altruistic deed is symmetrical? There is much talk these days about living a ‘balanced’ life, implying a kind of symmetry brought about by weighing the good with the bad, or a life where good healthy living is made to be balanced with what?—equal measures of a bad, unhealthy life? It must be better said that such a life of ‘balance’ is instead, one made of careful moderation, temperance, and kindness, all attributes of virtue, but not a life measured into symmetrical components whereby the good is balanced with the bad, into neat, even proportions to be measured. “What yardstick could preside over the balancing of the The Soul’s potencies and purposes?” (I, 6 [1], 1).

Already, one gets the feel for what Plotinus wishes for his readers to see, issues of beauty are tough to define as is the very pursuit of a good life. One thing is already clear: symmetry doesn’t necessarily define the beautiful. But the beautiful in bodily forms has to be more than that, and it doesn’t just mean that bodily forms (physical objects) aspire to the virtuous either. For a physical object to be beautiful as with an artistic expression, it has to be “in accord with Idea” (I, 6 [1], 2). In §3 Plotinus writes on the way an object’s beauty relies on the Idea and the intelligible. This is given the metaphor of fire, whereby fire’s beauty inhabits physical matter much as an Idea inhabits a physical, created form. “Always struggling aloft, this subtlest of elements is at the last limits of the bodily” (I, 6 [1], 3). Fire is destructive as much as it is life supporting, and just as well, our ideas and concepts of things can destroy or create the man-made objects of this world. Plotinus cherishes this kind of connection from the mystical to the physical. The things of the physical realm, when touched by the hand of an artist whose soul is in alignment with the intelligible realm, partake in the discernible, laudable, and beautiful qualities of the Idea. A beautiful house is not only beautiful in its aesthetic composure, it is beautiful in the way that it is engineered to be a comfortable home that has ease of movement, organization, and is structurally sound.

And another profound thought is brought about in §4, here one finds out that if we are to recognize beauty, we must be able to find it as an aspect of our own soul. “Seeing of this sort is done only with the eye of the soul” (I, 6 [1], 4). How can one judge the character of others without already having a sense of what it means to have an upright character as a potential in ourselves? It’s easy to misunderstand honest virtue when we have fallen in with the depravity of the body’s lusts. This idea smoothly transitions into §5 where one can foster the beautiful from inside, providing oneself with such qualities as “largeness of spirit, goodness of life, chasteness… [etc.]” (I, 6 [1], 5). But when the soul is sullied, it likes to wallow it its decrepitude. That paradoxical human trait the French call nostalgie de la boue (nostalgia for the mud) is not far from this downgrading of man’s soul described by Plotinus. How often does one hear of the variegated humiliations of desire, or the voluntary servitudes of the flesh, in which a man is willing to subject himself to when he is overly enamored with the body’s filiations? In spite of these hungers, what this suggests is the idea that the soul is already pure, and that when it wishes to taste earthly filth, it can still purify itself beyond that, “the soul is ugly when it is not purely itself” (I, 6 [1], 5). The beauty of gold now serves to metaphorically symbolize the purity that a soul can become when un-pure dirt is filtered from it, and then washed away.

Too close of an easy concession with the body draws the pure soul downward. To ascend up toward the beautiful the soul has to succumb to certain rejections of the bodily, e.g. “what is magnanimity except scorn of earthly things?” (I, 6 [1], 6). For Plotinus, the Good is beautiful as much as the “intellective” is beautiful. This has to mean that intelligence and the learned are forms of beauty, thus speaking mystically: The Soul is made beautiful in congruence with The Intelligence. By extension, a person’s soul is made beautiful in correspondence with the intelligible—with what is typically called wisdom.

For Plotinus, the beautiful souls have been “stripped of the muddy vesture with which they were clothed in their descent” (I, 6 [1], 7). Once man’s soiled habits have been cast off, he can again seek to become unified with the Good. His seeking for the Good will not be easy, since the comforts of the degraded body drag him away from it all the time. It is at this point, in §7, where one is not completely sure if the bodily has anything worthwhile to offer the soul, other than as mere vehicle. One is also led to wonder if rejecting the material world will be as beautiful as we are led to believe. Still, the beauty of an ascetic life is one where our goals are grand while our body is kept humble. The virtuous is kept alive in this direction upward. There is something to learn. The body is limited. To aim upward to the virtuous, what must be done? “We must close our eyes and invoke a new manner of seeing…” (I, 6 [1], 8).

Plotinus is good to remind his readers again that if they wish to be beautiful “by the virtue of men for their goodness” they will have to look inside themselves (I, 6 [1], 9). To become virtuous, one will have to look inside and work the soul as one who would sculpt fine marble. This kind of work is spiritual work, making the soul pure, emulating pure action, becoming a better person, and delimiting the pangs of the corporeal. To repeat, one cannot do any of this until we come to a closer comprehension of our own role, our own problems, and our particular shortcomings. When these virtuous thoughts are put into action, perhaps there will be time to take notice of Plotinus’s hierarchy, where Beauty resides with the Intellect, but does not completely reach the heights of the One, which is in closer proximity to the Good (from where Beauty originates).

But is beauty really as internal, rather than external as Plotinus suggests? It is clear that in our day-and-age, physical beauty is a quality that is highly valued. And it is also clear that being virtuous is highly valued. Of course, whether one takes the moral-high-ground, physical beauty will have to be subordinate. Who would voluntarily claim that physical beauty is better than virtuous action? Not many would say it with words outright. However, it can be observed that such dichotomies are not so obviously binary, and again how can such things be measured? Philosophically speaking, these sharp divisions between the body and spirit, matter and idea, figure prominently in a philosophic discourse beginning with Plato and beyond. It is because of this problem, between the mind and body, where one looks for the places where the two are reconciled, say with Phenomenology or other such ideas. With this said, one mustn’t become too cynical to discard Plotinus for his priorities, his hierarchies, and his divisions. Even though the world around us might privilege the beautiful face over the beautiful action, it continues to make sense that vain thinking is shallow. Plotinus’s way of placing the physical below the spiritual is idealistic without a doubt. This is problematic if one is to assume that such idealism is flawed, such cynicism prevails only if we repeatedly propagate it ourselves. Plotinus’s teachings are beautiful when one is ready to hear them. This is an idealistic effort, but a key factor will be what happens once the virtuous is put into action in the day-to-day of our lives. Only then will our idealism be actualized. Being good does not happen in a vacuum, it has to be meted out dynamically. The beauty of the good life is made possible by action. Plotinus was not only contemplative, he was wise and intelligible. If he had never put into words his beautiful thoughts, philosophy would be less pure, less wise.

[1] Elmer O’Brien mentions that “Beauty” is “the earlier of the treatises” and that “for centuries Beauty was the sole treatise by which Plotinus was known.” Plotinus, “Beauty,” in The Essential Plotinus, translated by Elmer O’Brien. (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing, 1964, 33.

[2] O’Brien attributes this idea, where the beautiful was mostly about the symmetrical, to the Stoics.

Of the three philosophers selected for this post, only one, Jean-François Lyotard writes specifically about art. Whereas the other two, Jean Baudrillard and Louis Althusser deal with complimentary issues that easily segue into aesthetics. With the question of how these French 20th century philosopher’s concepts relate to aesthetic issues, it will be worthwhile to briefly outline what each philosopher theorized, then in turn, how these ideas are relatable to aesthetics. Also, as much as their ideas can be put into an aesthetic context, each of these three thinker’s wide reaching ideas adapt to the political, the social, and the economic situation/s of our contemporary (post-modern) world without distortion.

Not only do all three philosophers share the same language and nationality, they also share in the legacy of Marxist thought. The most stridently Marxist was Althusser. One might be inclined to dub him a Marxist apologist. Because Althusser was so entrenched in Marxist doctrine, he arduously refined and reexamined how Marx was read. There is not just one way to read Marx, and Althusser had to find ways to read him that countered the political trends of Stalin’s Soviet Union. Althusser broke new ground in his description and theorizing concerning the inner workings of ideology, which Marx also identified as a problem, just not in the same degree that Althusser did. Ideology couldn’t be discarded, yet for Althusser, theory would take center stage. It was within theory that Althusser identified his concept of hailing. Hailing basically encapsulates interpellation. “All ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects.”[1]

In the most general sense, interpellation means that all (yes all) ideology actively assumes everyone should take part in its ideological prescriptions. For capitalism this means that everyone is interpellated at the workplace: ‘there is no I in team.’ For society this means that everyone is interpellated in the public sphere: ‘shake hands with people you meet.’ For economics this means that everyone is interpellated in an economic sphere: ‘save your money for retirement.’ It all makes ‘common sense’ and none of these slogans are typically regarded of as ideological, since ideology works best when it doesn’t identify itself as such.[2]

But what about art?—how does art interpellate the audience? A viewer mistakenly presupposes that everyone knows the ‘rules’ of the game, if such rules can be said to be real to begin with. Such presupposed rules could be an ideal that all art must somehow be beautiful, or that art must incessantly aspire to beauty. This simultaneously suggests that art cannot be ugly and that if art looks unappealing (to us) in some way, we judge to be wrong. Interpellation easily works both ways, art presents ideological subjects, as with social realism (Stalin adores the rosy cheeked proletariat). And as noted, an audience can bring its ideology to the act of viewing art, ‘my child can do that’ is code for: I cannot see the value in this painting, beyond the efforts of a child, because my narrow idealism demands nothing less than the allure of old-fashioned academicism.

Lyotard presents another way that Marxist theory affected philosophy and the arts, albeit his Marxist influence is much less militant than Althusser’s. Probably one of the first to put postmodernism into name, Lyotard wrote convincingly of a new kind of relativism, a.k.a. the metanarrative. “Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.”[3] This meant that the so-called ‘grand narratives’ of the past were no longer the only narratives that mattered, or that they were no longer the ones that carried the utmost power. These metanarratives are seen as stemming mostly from the rationalist ideals of the Enlightenment, such as: the authority of science, the dominance of Christian doctrine, and of course, the supremacy of rationalism itself. This idea has multiple readings, and most of it has a thin (and strong) Marxist thread throughout, that obviously seeks to delimit the powers that be. Decentralizing power means that a special kind of relativist paradigm must prevail, and this is a problem with Lyotard’s death of the metanarrative that cannot be addressed here, yet relativism should be recognized as a dominate symptom of postmodernity.

For society at large, Lyotard critiques, and calls into question, the ascendance of scientific supremacy. With his ideas, one is better equipped to seriously question if science does indeed have all the answers, and, if the scientific pursuit of getting to know the secrets of the universe is really all that helpful for mankind. Rationality too thinks it has all the answers, but it easily forgets the value of intuition, randomness and the uncompleted. Amidst these things, (postmodern) art has special place, since it tries to represent the unrepresentable, at least in Lyotard’s brilliant way of refining Kant’s aesthetic notion of the sublime. To represent the unrepresentable sounds like nonsense if one is only interpreting the idea with a rational lens. That which cannot be named, must be that which is mysterious and enigmatic. Paradoxically, if art chooses to negate the unrepresentable, it would look something like advertising, we’d all ‘get it’ and its value would fade, duly its essential and sublime mystery would be automatically lost.[4]

Of the three theorists, Baudrillard stands as the most identifiable to a general audience, due to his (dubious and loose) connection to The Matrix. One easily forgets that Baudrillard wrote compelling philosophy, if the polished cinematic science-fiction—that’s supposed to emulate his ideas—doesn’t take half as much time to read as one of his finely crafted, labyrinthine essays. His idea of simulacrum replaces the real not by mere imitation, but by nothing at all. The simulacra are mostly the empty signs of capitalist excess and power relations. The referent is empty. Hyperreality defines this familiar pseudo-reality because we can no longer tell the difference between the real and the simulacra. “By crossing into a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor that of truth, the era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials…”[5] Political scandal epitomizes what Baudrillard describes because we are simply unable to detect what real political power actually is, amidst the intrigue, gossip and scandal of Washington insiders. We are led to believe that politics has more to do with what makes the news, rather than the ‘boring’ work of actually getting things done on a daily basis. For the art world, Baudrillard’s concepts hit with surprising force during a time in the 80s and 90s when questions of the copy, appropriation, sampling, authenticity, etc., were becoming critical aspects of a postmodern reevaluation of the puritanical dogma/s of modernism. Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacra is necessarily empty, and not a mere copy of reality, still, his foreboding pessimism glares with cynicism, since he exposes where we as a society are lacking. He presented a dystopian vision, yet the provocation haunts us all the same.

Where would we be if we were not critical of the transparent powers that impregnate authority? Marxism seems to have failed in the political arena, however, it continues to demonstrate its capacity to undermine established ways of thinking. Its power is dialectical. It moves critical thinking ahead by the strife of intellectual exposure and disclosure. It’s easy to be smug and narrow. These things don’t require alternative modes of analysis. All three of the philosophers presented here have demonstrated alternate routes from the mainstream. But, when will we listen?

aurelio madrid

Bibliography

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Towards an Investigation.” In On Ideology, Translated by Ben Brewster, 1-60. New York: Verso, 2008.

Lyotard, Jean-François. “The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge” and “What is Postmodernism?” in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, 1-82. Minneapolis, Minnesota: The University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

[1] Althusser, Louis, “Ideology and State Apparatuses,” 47.

[2] Althusser names this phenomena: denegation.

[3] Jean-François Lyotard, intro to “The Postmodern Condition,” xxiv.

[4] …never-mind what this means for an interpretation of Pop Art or Warhol’s claim that there’s ‘nothing behind it.’

Michael Frede’s posthumously published A Free Will: Origins of the Notion of Ancient Thought [1] features two chapters of particular interest concerning the development of the notion of will and of free will according to the ancient Stoics: chapter three, “The Emergence of a Notion of Will in Stoicism” and chapter five, “The Emergence of a Notion of Free Will in Stoicism.” Stoicism got its roots in Greece and followed, roughly 400+ years of popularity. From the Greeks on to the Romans, Stoicism endured for such a long time because it is a practical way of living one’s life. The philosophy of Stoicism offers to help people lead a better life through wisdom, instead of getting swept up in the contingencies of life, and henceforth becoming foolish.

This book was put together by A.A. Long after Frede’s tragic death in 2007. It is based on a series of lectures Frede delivered during the 1997-98 fall semester, as the Sather Professor of Classical Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. It reads like a lecture and less like an academic document, meaning that, Frede didn’t include copious notes and textual analysis. Instead, the ideas are offered from a knowledgeable professor to his students. It is obvious from the reading that Frede has an extensive working knowledge of Stoicism, enough to convey it is this matter of fact way. Frede put down a clear rendering of how the Stoics, not only identified the notion of will in the actions and thoughts of man, but also, how the Stoics identified and developed the will into a nuanced conception of free will. The goal of this post will be to identify a few of the major steps this Stoic development had to take to become one of the first conceptions of free will in the ancient world, starting with the will and carrying that conception to a notion of free will.

I. Will

The first thing to do is look at the development of will in Stoicism. Believe it or not, Aristotle and Plato did not have a complete notion of free will. As Frede says, Plato and Aristotle thought of the soul as bi or tripartite, this view was rejected by the Stoics (32). Socrates was the role-model for the Stoics, at least how Socrates is depicted in the early dialogues of Plato—namely Plato’s Protagoras and The Pheado (32). Socrates placed a premium on reason, and so did the Stoics. For the Stoics, reason was their guide. Aristotle had the idea that there were irrational parts of man’s soul that impel people to act. The irrational part of man’s soul can develop into a rational way of knowing the world. The irrational part of the soul doesn’t leave. The Stoics had a slightly different take on this, because they believed that partitioning off of the soul had undesirable consequences. If the soul is divided, one might come to think that the irrational parts of the soul are alright, and that if we just enhance these irrational drives, we might get what we want, enough to become fooled into thinking that these irrational things are good and better than the rational.

The Stoics, according to Frede, argued that such things as anger and fear are not necessarily natural. Anger and fear do not help us with attaining genuine good and evil outright. The only good someone attains should be aimed at wisdom, and evil is a result of foolishness. Anger and fear are not irrational—they are products of bad reasoning. There are things to reject, for instance, anger which is bad, and there are good things to accept like temperance, which we can aspire to. It is not the soul that creates the assumed irrational part of us. The person who accepts this is prone to mistakes. Our goals are mistaken if we are not guided by wisdom. Wisdom itself will be looked at more in depth later. Although the Stoics rejected Plato and Aristotle’s ‘bi or tripartite’ divisions of the soul, according to Frede, their idea has more to do with a growth of the person’s reason out of the irrational. When we were born, we were more plantlike (for the Stoics) and our growth was governed by nature (by physis / φύσις), from here we grow and develop out of this plantlike state into a rational being, thus leaving the irrational behind (35). Anything like a rational desire for anger should be supplanted by the rational, and wise, desire to move away from anger. The irrational is then left behind for the rational.

On a fundamental level, the Stoics believed that cognitive perception involves incoming “impressions” from the outside world. Some impressions entice us and other things repel us. This, in turn, causes an initial impulse to either act on the impulse toward the impression, to grab it, to throw it down or to talk about it, etc. The impressions are thought to contain propositional content, either they are considered to be true or false (37). What this means is that the veracity or falsity of the multitude of impressions requires one to place concepts to the particular way the impressions come and go—i.e. we learn by experience how to deal with things on this fundamentally practical level. How one deals with these things is basically conceived of as thought itself. The main question has to do with what to do with the impressions. The active way in which we deal with the impressions is: assent (37). The way in which with give assent to any number of given impressions forms our beliefs and attitudes about the world. In other words, when we have an impression, we choose to give assent to the impression. The ways in which we do this form a basis for the particularity in the ways we each do things as individuals, rationally.

Appetites and passions are not to be confused with beliefs. And emotions for the Stoics are simply misguided beliefs. To draw this out a little more, Frede gives an example of what we do when we cut our hand with a knife. In this case, we have two possibilities. One is to become paranoid. Leading us into thinking and believing that the knife cut will get infected, and from the infection you’ll die. The base problem with this belief is the fear of death. The Stoics thought that death is inevitable, and therefore death should not be feared. This doesn’t mean that Stoic entices or hastens death, rather he’ll be, because he is careful, alerted by the cut to care for it so as to maintain the life he has, in order to continue fulfill the good. If he is wise, and not foolish he’ll take care of himself without panicking. So, this means that the second possibility is to not get all emotional over the knife cut with a misguided belief that death is evil, and therefore to be avoided at all cost. It is foolish to think that one will not be rational and tenacious in the face of adversity. As a Stoic, you will, and can do something about the knife cut, and the best thing is to not get too worked up over it. To be a Stoic is to be unmoved by the passions, it is this quality that defines what it means to be a Stoic today. The rational side of emotions is to be enhanced and cultivated. To be sure, they were not trying to do away with emotions. They wanted to exert control over them. Life would be better led without an overflow of misguided beliefs, emotive and passionate solutions to cloud your view. The Stoics certainly didn’t want to become pathological in the way one deals with the problems that are inevitable to living. Everyday problems are a given, it is how problems are dealt with that determines the wisdom of any given situation. Stoical wisdom will be looked at in part II of this paper.

For the Stoics, all desires are rational, which means that they are products of reason. Probably the plainest way to put it would be to say that desire is the assent to an impulsive impression. To assent to a given desirable impression is to give in to the impression (good or bad), and this is governed by our reason. One has the ability to see that the choice a person makes determines the outcomes. Reason provides the guide by which to direct the impulse in the right direction. Beginning to emerge, for the first time in history, is a conception of the will as it was realized in Stoic philosophy. This doesn’t mean that the Stoics ‘invented’ the will, rather, they identified a conceptualization of it for the first time. The will is conceived of in relation to the ways by which one gives assent to impressions. An act of will presupposes a reasonable assent to any given impression (42). The will is clearly what drives our actions. Yet, there are more distinctions to be made from this simple assertion. One important point is to show that the Stoics, were not just rolling with any kind of will. After all, there can be unreasonable acts of willing that are seen as unwise (foolish) as much as there can be reasonable acts of willing that are thought of as wise. The will puts things into action with wisdom or with folly, but both manifestations consist of willing something, and the Stoics were not advocating acting foolishly. Their conception of the will is set up as a means to promote prudentially wise actions. One decides to act in a certain way to an impression, the rational way we do this is a matter of choice—it is up to us how to assent with the day-to-day impressions. The way we do this is a matter of our own choosing. It is a matter of will.

The Stoics believed that focusing on the inner life of man, and how man maximizes his ability to implement wisdom in any particular situation was the way to be wise in the world. A Stoic life is stable and temperate against the changing winds of fate. Frede names the Greek slave philosopher Epictetus as the first to identify the notion of free-will, which is closely identified with the idea of choice or in Greek prohairesis (προαίρεσις)(44). By use of this word, Epictetus was influenced by Aristotle, who also made good use of the term prohairesis, it is translated as: choice and/or will (but for Aristotle it meant choice). But it might be better thought of as a ‘higher order’ choice and will, whereby it means to choose in a certain way, specifically, how to assent to impulsive impressions. Basically, it is up to us how we’ll react to a given impression. It is up to us how we act in the world, but this doesn’t mean everything will go our way. It is also up to us to decide how to manage ourselves. A Stoic, like Epictetus, is not swayed by emotion or passion, but it is still his rational choice to be swayed for better or for worse. So, for example, when he chooses to cross the street, he wills to cross the street, but this does not mean that just because he willed it, that it’ll happen. No choice is entirely up to us. Frede tells us that Epictetus didn’t favor assent as much as the other Stoics did. It is not clear if this affects Frede’s points on the conception of will for the Stoics on the whole. But, one thing is clear, how we specifically choose to give in or assent to impressions is a matter of prohairesis, primarily if we are choosing in such a way so as to indicate that we were in no way coerced, manipulated or something of the sort.

The will can, nevertheless, be made to be good or bad according to the kinds of choices we make. One still might find such a thing as a non-impulsive impression. This means that when a person believes something will happen, say an inclement weather event, he does not have to will to believe it, in order to give assent to it. The assent one gives, generally speaking, has to be directed to an impression, that enables an impulse, and this leads to an active volition (48). There is an explicitly active component to willing for the Stoics when someone chooses to give assent to an impulse. With the Stoics, Frede shows that they were the able to establish this conception of the will as an ability of the man to implement reason to make careful choices and decisions in his life—to lead the life of a Stoic.

II. Free Will

In order to help people with the wisdom of making the right choices, the Stoics also warn that man’s beliefs can be corrupted, and that his choices, if ill-chosen, are foolish. The Stoics, in this sense, wanted to shake us out of our day to day complacency (66). A Stoical way of stating this would be this: a wise man is free whereas the foolish man is a slave. But what does this really mean? Frede writes that for the Stoic Chrysippus, freedom meant that a person acts on his own, according to one’s own account, and he is able to act with discretion (66-67). The fool thinks that a lot of things are good and bad without much wise reflection, and it is for this reason that the fool becomes dominated by misguided impressions of what is good, and likewise, what is bad.

In order to expand on this conception, that a foolish man is dominated by his bad and unwise choices, the Stoics expanded the notion of what it meant to be forced or compelled or made to do something. This means that freedom had to account for the idea that one does something on one’s own accord, and is not coerced into doing so. A foolish man is usually able to choose otherwise, as much as a wise man is able to choose (with apt forbearance).

Interestingly, this discussion of freedom, (as it relates to free will) for the Stoics, has to include God, or better said a Demiurge, (δημιουργός), a divine craftsman. If people are acting within the world that God created, then they are acting according to the order of things. When they act-out in spite of God’s order, they are acting foolishly. This means that, if they are foolish, they are thoroughly enslaved. The world contains valuable and preferential things like health, well being, etc. that can be preferred over the less desirable things like illness, suffering etc. But, because these are preferred things, doesn’t make them good things, in and of themselves. For the Stoics, health is a preferred thing, and to tend to one’s state of health is good because it contributes to the way things are set out to be, in the way God intended it, as he created it. The way that one deals with things makes them good or bad. The Stoic notion of the rational is teleological, meaning that the rational is ultimately geared and oriented toward the good. When we are acting in a good way, we are acting rationally. Aside from the Stoics, this idea has its problems, but the problems will have to stay put, since we do not have the time to challenge the good of rationality, i.e. the questionable thesis that rationally always good, is just too big to tackle here.

The Demiurge, (a.k.a. God) created man as a self-sustaining creature, similar to the animals, Frede tells us that animals act on impressions in much the same way we do, yet with one critical difference: we, as humans, recognize what we need to do to maintain ourselves. People have a choice, and their natural ability to choose comes from their rational means of understanding. In short, God created man with the innate capacity to reason. It is because of this rationality that we as humans have an understanding of the good, and what it means to do good things. We are able to do these things according to how God created us, and most importantly, we can do these things of our own accord. Man is also able to recognize, for the Stoics, that he (man) contributes to the order of God’s creation. Freedom in this sense, means that man is capable of doing what needs to be done, and it is guided by understanding and rational ability. We give form to this world according to the good God has made us capable for. The Stoics believed in a kind of freedom that enabled man to act on what needs to be done toward the good. This is done on man’s own accord, instead of being forced to do it by an outside force, including the force of God’s will. Man’s free will is not controlled by God, it is controlled by man. Man by nature is made for the good in the Stoical sense of the word. As was indicated earlier, man is born irrational, and he develops into a fully rational being. This emphasizes the notion that man is created by God to become a reasonable free agent with an ability to make up his mind in the day to day situations life presents one with—without an irrational component and coercion.

The Stoics thought that all man’s beliefs, desires and ways of thinking, comprise of a cohesive whole, i.e. a single system. Yet, if misguided attachments are allowed in, one has relinquished freedom. Any false beliefs and foolish ways corrupt the whole, they serve to not only undermine freedom itself, but also the integrity of all that is good in a person. This, of course implies a striving for the purity of the freedom we create for ourselves. Stoicism is very strict. One false belief undercuts all true beliefs. Inappropriate attachments signify that the will is not absolutely free.

How are will and freedom brought together in Frede’s account of Stoicism? Frede writes that Epictetus wanted people to focus all their efforts on refining the will (76). Man’s integrity depends on the unbending goodness of his will. Not only should the will be good, but it should also be in accordance with nature. Basically God has given you a will, yet it is up to you to decide for yourself what you’ll do with it. In a Stoical universe, God doesn’t force one to make the right choices. In the same sense, one is still subject, and can fall prey, and become enslaved by their compulsive passions and appetites. The idea that we have the ability to do otherwise, one way or another, has everything to do with free will. Still, the wise man is really the only one who is said to be free, and is therefore, not enslaved like the foolish man who succumbs to the whimsy of his emotions and appetites. The wise man is free, where the fool is enslaved. Sometimes the foolish man will do things that are good for the wrong reasons, showing that even with his rational will he is able to freely choose foolishly or wisely. The foolish man harms himself, but not God. God purposely left it up to man to decide what to do with his life. In the same sense, the wise man’s compliance toward the good is not within God’s power to change or affect either. The wise man willfully makes better choices, where the fool willfully doesn’t (79).

The wisdom a man possesses enables him to aim for the good in accordance with God’s plan. The wise man acts in accordance with the good because it is in his nature to do so, God created him that way. As mentioned before, the Stoics believed that God created man with a capacity to be rational, and God geared man’s rationality toward the good, and to do good deeds. It is the voluntary imperative of the wise man to propel the good things into action. Frede tells us that free actions, for the Stoics, are motivated by an attachment we have for the good (79). We wish to maintain the good because we are able to recognize that this is the order of things, that is, if we are Stoical. Our actions must be appropriate to the good. Frede doesn’t clarify precisely what the good actually is, one will openly assume that it is essentially rational, meaning that the good thing to do is the rational thing to do.

Someone has the ability to give assent to an impression that he sees will bring about good—this constitutes his freedom. Yet, along with this, one might think that this predisposition determines the way a wise man will act all the time. For the Stoics, this is not the case, since one can still choose to do otherwise. One is free to be the fool. Then there’s the issue of being forced to do something against one’s will, this is the case where foolishness dominates a person’s decisions to otherwise. The fool is not free to when he is subject to his insatiable appetites. In this case, it is not made evident by Frede why the foolish man cannot reform his ways and why he has to always succumb to his passions. It should be that he can choose to negate his passions as much as the wise man is able to. With practice one can reform. This is not always the case, but it happens often enough to make a case for it, in contrast to the view that a fool is doomed or fated to be foolish. Similarly the wise man is not dominated by the good, in such a way so as to imagine that good forces him to act in certain ways. The wise man can also become a fool. Frede describes the Stoic’s notion that an un-wise man is forced by his unruly impressions, whereas the wise man’s assent is brought about by measured knowledge and his wise understanding, only if he is willing to do so.

Because the wise man can act within the scope of rationality, doesn’t mean that he’s forced to do so against his will. He is free because he is equipped with the appropriate understanding and insight, enough to make the right choices up and against the possibility of doing otherwise in any given circumstance. For these reasons he is free—he has free will. In a Stoical conception of the world, God set up a situation whereby man, throughout the stages of his development, acquires the ability and capacity for wisdom to make the right decisions. Man goes wrong when he has false impressions, misguided beliefs and when he gives improper, foolish assent to an impression.

III. Conclusions

We give credit to the Stoics for recognizing and identifying a notion of free will. This is a free will because one is not forced into making decisions and choices contrary to one’s own volitions. There are slight problems with this picture, since we can’t always have a precise idea what is actually good, or what constitutes a good actions. One can always be fooled into thinking that a particular action is a wise action when it is not wise. For instance, when we set out to help someone whom we might think is in need of our help, and who, with our help is actually hindered from helping himself. We don’t always know the wise choice, no matter how much reasoning we surround it with. One doesn’t always make the right choices. Still, to a certain degree, it is cynical to believe that we cannot make the right choices.

From Aristotle and Plato’s ‘bi or tripartite’ conception of the soul which included the irrational, the Stoics refined this conception of the soul. The soul for the Stoics, leaves the irrational behind to make room for the rational. The impressions, re: the sensual input, are important for the Stoics because they were the raw material from which a person had the opportunity to act rationally. From these impressions we learn, by experience, how to deal with things on a fundamentally practical level. The way a person gives assent to impressions is rational, it is propositional. There is a right way and a wrong way to deal with things for the Stoics. The trick is to not get carried away, or to get distracted with misguided beliefs, emotions, and over-passionate solutions. This means that desires are rational in a Stoical way of thinking. Desires are products of reason because of they manner in which we give assent to the impulse of any given impressions. This is propositional. In Frede’s analysis, the first known development, or better said, conception of the will, is from the Stoics. One is given a choice with how to contend with the impulses one has from impressions. But, this is not just any choice, it is a prohairesis, a higher order will. This kind of will is only free if it is not coerced, or manipulated into action by another person, force, etc.

A wise man is free, and a foolish man is enslaved. The fool reacts to his impressions without adequate attention to the rationality of his actions. Although the fool might act rationally, his actions are not geared toward the good—his rationales are foolish. The fool, in a way, is the best example of free will. Because it is fool who shows by his actions that he is free. This means that a Stoical conception of freedom has to account for the idea that one does something of one’s own accord, and hence, is not coerced into doing so. The fool doesn’t (necessarily) need to be coerced into acting like a fool. He freely chooses to do so by his own free will. For the Stoics, God made us fully capable of reason. We are free to do with this what we will. Only when the will is directed with wisdom, i.e. rationally, are people acting in such a way so as to be in accordance with God’s plan, God’s telos (τέλος). Again, God created man with the innate capacity for reason, and still, one does things of one’s own accord. Because God does not intervene, humans are free from divine intervention and will. Man is capable of understanding what the good is, enough to know that he can rationally aspire to. A wise man is free and a foolish man is enslaved.

The Stoics had the idea that there are basic truths by with to live by, as indicated above, living a rational life, propelling your action toward the good, and recognizing that God’s plan is good enough to follow. The point being that, yes, there are general truths, and no set rules, but we as humans are able to get along creatively and ingeniously to progress with living a life in confidence with our ability to do these things. All is not hopeless.

aurelio madrid

[1] Michael Frede, A Free Will: Origins of the Notion in Ancient Thought, ed A.A. Long (Berkeley: University of California Press).

In a contract, what is right is already assumed. For Hegel, this becomes wrong when the two rights are brought together and one is “particular” (or peculiar) in a way that differs from the other. The opposing right, in its particularity, is a “semblance” (counterfeit) of right, it is only resolved when it negates itself to become right and not universal.

§83

Even if wrong is merely a semblance of right, it desires to be self-sufficient. The wrong may appear to be right, or it is a clear nullity of the right, i.e. it’s just wrong, in the sense of the latter, it is a crime.

A. Unintentional Wrong

§84

Possessions and contracts are drawn up by particular individuals, with any particularities that become inevitable under such agreements. These can be made legal in the universal recognition of the agreement. But, these can be interpreted in differing ways. Hence, we have the growth of varied disagreements resulting from the festering misunderstandings.

§85

With civil law we make claims (or disputes) onto things that have to do with individuals and/or their property, we find that disputes of this kind are brought about by basic questions having to do with what is properly mine, or yours, along with any subsequent negations.

§86

When we have only our particular interests in mind, right is made into a mere “semblance” (counterfeit) of itself, perhaps represented as an obligation. Yet, when confronted with universal right, as it is in-itself, two people can (hopefully) be made to recognize something beyond their mutual disagreement/s.

B. Deception

§87

Deception is brought about by an individual’s “reduction” of the right to a semblance, which must be a counterfeit of right. Deception occurs, if we are fooled into thinking that the deception is right.

§88

Although a contract, concerning property etc., can be legitimate, another’s respect for the universal will may not be in line with the actual terms of the agreements in the contract.

§89

The universal aspect of right must be held, above and beyond, that which is arbitrary. Anything that does not recognize this is deceptive.

C. Coercion and Crime

§90

To own something means you can bribe someone with it (as an unfortunate manifestation of your monomaniacal suffering).

§91

Although certain people can be dominated by others due to their obsequiousness, my free will can resist being physically beaten. My free will might fall weak to banal external enforcements—only if I let in.

§92

Force and coercion work in tandem to destroy the willing, the willful.

§93

Coercion can be sublated (Aufheben) by coercion. Also, we must unfortunately, allow for forms of coercion that are obliquely horrible (re: pedagogical).

§94

We will be sure to recognize that abstract right has it within its power to coerce the wrongfulness placed on it.

§95

To infringe on another person’s rights, by coercion, is a crime. Hegel mentions the curious “negatively infinite judgment” [I’m continuing to research Hegel’s use of the judgment in his Logic] provisionally, the infinite judgment seems to be a judgment that is made between the individual and the “notion” (concept) and an infinite judgment must be when we are trying to subsume the ‘big picture’ in our way of judging the conceptual nature of things. So, a negative infinite judgment must go against a positive judgment, therefore, it is a crime. Crime, not only negates my will, it also tries to obviate my universal “capacity for rights.”

§96

Surely, there must be a variance of quality and quantity by which we can assess a crime’s malfeasance. This must be determined in relation to the specific damage visited upon another person. Crimes manifest in a multitude of guises and must be considered with due measure.

§97

When a crime is committed, there is an attempt to nullify a person’s rights. So, in turn, there is the open possibility to then nullify the negation (re: to right the wrong). Punishment seeks to sublate the wrongdoing.

§98

Your evil “infringement” is only external, therefore, you should be held responsible for any or all property damage incurred by your spurious malfeasance.

§99

Another person, can willfully injure my person, in so doing, this person is positively wrong, i.e. an injurious crime cannot coincide positively with the existence of other’s rights, freedoms, wills, etc. The only positive place for the injurious crime remains with what criminal does against me (see footnote: Feuerbach’s father).

§100

A criminal sets up a kind of law unto his crime—punishable offences are often rationalized into existence.

§101

Crimes are to be punished according to the quality and quantity of the crime committed. Your injustice deserves a proper punishment (review lengthy section again, re: the absurdity of an eye-for-an-eye, etc.).

§102

Revenge doesn’t always exact an equivalent justice and it can be sustained throughout generations. Revenge might lose its original complaint over the years.

§103

To resolve a wrongdoing, the “subjective will” must aspire/appeal to the “universal will” to lay claim to justice, rather than to simply declare revenge.

Transition from Right to Morality

§104

We must acquire within ourselves the universal ability to recognize when we have been wronged, hereby making an advancement in the determination/s of our will. This must be a self-actualization that is transferable within our relationship with others. Freedom develops from the will in the abstract to be made self-determinate. Our will is made actual in our possessions. When we hold these possessions in common with others, we do so under contract. For something to be wrong the contingency of an individual’s will poses as a semblance of right (and so, banality continues in its counterfeit mode, ad infinitum…). It is at this point where we can (with Hegel’s assistance) progress to questions of morality.